Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Sociology grad student: scholars need to and can make their research and writing more public

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Sociology PhD student Nathan Jurgenson argues that scholars need to make their research more public:

To echo folks like Steven Sideman or danah boyd, we have an obligation to change this; academics have a responsibility to make their work relevant for the society they exist within.

The good news is that the tools to counter this deficiency in academic relevance are here for the taking. Now we need the culture of academia to catch up. Simply, to become more relevant, academics need to make their ideas more accessible.

There are two different, yet equally important, ways academics need to make their ideas accessible:

(1) Accessible by availability: ideas should not be locked behind paywalls.

(2) Accessible by design: ideas should be expressed in ways that are interesting, readable and engaging.

Considering that Jurgenson researches social media (see my earlier post on another of his arguments), I’m not surprised to see him make this argument. Though most of his argument is tilted toward the brokenness of the current system, Jurgenson wants to help the academic world see that we now have the tools, particularly online, to do some new things.

A few other thoughts:

1. Does every generation of graduate students suggest the current system is broken or is this really a point in time where a big shift could occur?

2. Jurgenson also hints that academics need to be more able to write for larger publics. So it is not just about the tools but about the style and rhetoric needed to speak through these other means. I can’t imagine any “Blogging Sociology” courses in grad schools anytime soon but Jurgenson is bringing up a familiar complaint: academics sometimes have difficulty making their case to people who are not academics.

3. Jurgenson doesn’t really get at this but these new tools also mean that data, not just writing, can be shared more widely. This could also become an important piece of a more open academia.

4. The idea that academic writing should or could be fun is intriguing. How many academics could pull this off? Might this reduce the gravitas of academic research?

Using the Internet to meet your neighbors

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The New York Times takes a look at Nextdoor.com, a website that privately allows neighbors to meet each other and interact online:

Nextdoor’s site provides a house-by-house map of neighbors who are members — although members can choose not to have their names attached to their addresses — as well as a forum for posting items of general interest; classified listings for buying, selling or giving away things; and a database for neighbor-recommended local services.

The company, which introduced its service last October, says it has set up more than 2,000 such neighborhoods in the United States, each containing about 500 to 750 households. These mostly follow boundaries defined by Maponics, a supplier of geographic data…

Neighborhood identity has not been destroyed by the Internet. Robert J. Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard, says: “There’s a common misreading that technology inevitably leads to the decline of the local community. I don’t believe that. Technology can be harnessed to facilitate local interactions.”…

In his new book, “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect,” Professor Sampson argues that worries about the supposed loss of community in cities are nothing new. In 1938, for example, the sociologist Louis Wirth described “anonymous” and “superficial” social relations as essential elements of urbanism. But Professor Sampson says that this ignores the way that a city was, and remains, ordered by distinctive neighborhoods — what he calls “the enduring significance of place.”

Sampson’s comments give me an idea (which I’m sure others have already discovered): the Internet itself is a place/space that is built upon existing places. Another way to think about this is that the Internet is another social layer that both interacts with existing places but also has its own places and rules of social conduct. People can interact more with those who live near them and/or they can choose to interact with people around the world (that were previously unavailable to them). This is not the same as places like “Second Life” – it seemed to me that a lot of academics were really interested in this idea as they were curious to see how people would handle being in a new realm they could help create – as programs like Facebook or Nextdoor don’t let people completely escape from their surroundings and may just enhance existing acquaintances and relationships. Going forward, should we think of Facebook as a new kind of extended neighborhood?

Sampson’s ideas also are an interesting reply to questions like whether Facebook is making us lonely. Sampson is not the only sociologist who is arguing that the Internet does not necessarily isolate people.

Sociologist Dalton Conley to spend sabbatical working for the online University for the People

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Sociologist Dalton Conley has an interesting sabbatical project: working to help the online University for the People up and going.

The international, tuition-free, nonprofit institution, founded in 2009, is a pioneering effort in e-learning and peer-to-peer learning. Using open-source technology and coursework provided gratis by well-regarded institutions, it offers two- and four-year degree programs in business administration and computer science. It has formed partnerships with Yale University, New York University, and Hewlett-Packard, and to date has enrolled 1,400 students from 130 countries.”Higher education is our best cultural product, as far as I’m concerned,” says Mr. Conley. “We also export our less-impressive cultural products, McDonald’s and Hollywood and so forth, so I think it’s a great idea to help folks who want to help themselves to increase their skill sets and help their own countries.”…

As University of the People’s dean of arts and sciences, Mr. Conley will work to expand course offerings. “We need to focus on pragmatic degrees that are going to help individuals in their societies, in developing countries,” he says. He hopes the next two majors will be in health, to train nurses and community-health workers, and education, to train teachers.

This sounds like it could be a very interesting project. However, isn’t access to this free online school still dependent on who has regular Internet access? Without that kind of infrastructure, will this school be best able to help those who most need the help?

Our world: the Beatles can get $250k for the use of an original recording on a TV show

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I’ve seen/heard several discussions of the use of the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to close the most recent episode of Mad Men. Here is some of the story behind how the show was able to get permission to use the song – for $250,000:

 “It was always my feeling that the show lacked a certain authenticity because we never could have an actual master recording of the Beatles performing,” Matthew Weiner, the creator and show runner of “Mad Men,” said in a telephone interview on Monday. “Not just someone singing their song or a version of their song, but them, doing a song in the show. It always felt to me like a flaw. Because they are the band, probably, of the 20th century.”…

Near the end of the “Mad Men” episode, titled “Lady Lazarus” and written by Mr. Weiner, the advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) finds himself struggling to understand youth culture and is given a copy of the Beatles album “Revolver,” a new release in the summer of 1966.

But instead of starting his listening experience with the album’s acerbic lead-off track, “Taxman,” Draper instead skips to its final — and, shall we say, more experimental — song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contemplating it for a few puzzled moments before he shuts it off. (That psychedelic song, with its signature percussion loops and distorted John Lennon vocals, also plays over the closing credits of the episode.)…

To win the company’s approval in this case, Mr. Weiner said, “I had to do a couple things that I don’t like doing, which is share my story line and share my pages.” He added that he received the approval from Apple Corps last fall, about a month before filming started on the episode.

Several thoughts:

1. Does this show that the Beatles still matter? On one hand, yes: the creator said he wanted to have an authentic Beatles song on his show. On the other hand, this is a show about the 1960s – it is a period piece, a “retro cool” show, not a show about the modern day that would show the current relevance of the Beatles. The creator suggests they are the band of the 20th century, inviting questions about who might be the artist of the 21st century.

2. Contra #1 above, the Beatles can still get $250k for the use of their song. Is this about the greatness of their work or because they have been so tight in who is able to license their music? Are the copyright holders of the Beatles music (some combo of Michael Jackson’s estate and Sony?) simply waiting for McCartney and Starr to die so they can reap a windfall from licensing?

3. The article doesn’t discuss this but the selection of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is particularly interesting. This song would never make it on a Beatles “greatest hits” album (it is not on the 1 album or the Red or Blue albums of the 1970s). It is buried at the end of the Revolver album. At the same time, many books and critics acknowledge that this song is a turning point in the group’s career. It was actually the first recorded song for Revolver, an album noted by many critics as the greatest album (or one of the top 3) of all time. It was a sharp departure from earlier Beatles music: in a few short years, the group had moved from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to Lennon singing about ideas from The Tibetan Book of the Dead with all sorts of studio effects like backward guitar around him. My guess is that the playing of song means that Don Draper’s is about to take an interesting turn (along with the rest of the 1960s).

4. A question about copyright: will the Beatles music ever become part of the public domain? It would be a shame if it does not.

5. How long until we live in a world when nobody knows about or cares about the Beatles? I’m particularly interested in the changes that will happen when the Baby Boomer generation fades away…

New Microsoft lab in New York City to study social media and social science

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Microsoft is opening up a new laboratory in New York City that will focus on the intersection of social media and social science:

Microsoft Research is opening a new lab in New York City, headed by ex-Yahoo senior scientists. The star crop of researchers includes sociologist and network theorist Duncan Watts, computational scientist David Pennock, and machine learning expert John Langford…

Microsoft’s research hubs are behind several of the company’s successful products. The Kinect and Bing were both developed for years as research projects before Microsoft turned them into products…

The NYC lab recruits bring in mathematical and computation tools that could work magic with existing social media research already underway at Microsoft Research, led by folks like Gen-fluxer danah boyd. “I would say that the highly simplified version of what happens is that data scientists do patterns and ethnographers tell stories,” boyd tells Fast Company. While Microsoft Research New England has strengths in qualitative social science, empirical economics, machine learning, and mathematics, “We’ve long noted the need for data science types who can bridge between us,” boyd explained in a blog post announcing the NYC labs.

Data available via social networks like Twitter and Facebook finally offer a discrete measure of how people interact with one another, and how influence flows through their web of social links. As Watts explains it: “We want to understand how these phenomena work, we have to take a very large scale view of the world but have to refine our viewing a very fine grained way.”

Microsoft has hired 15 founding members (8 of those names are public), but that number is likely to grow in the coming months “like a university department in good times,” Chayes said. (Microsoft Research’s other units vary in size from 40 to 400 members of staff). The lab will draw on collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, Princeton, New York University, and Columbia who’ve expressed an interest in working with the NYC labs.

This sounds like a fascinating opportunity to bring together a number of notable researchers across disciplines to tackle new issues and data.

I wonder how many academics would bristle at this news simply because of the connection to Microsoft, the supposedly big bad company that has tried to force its way in the computing world and is seen less favorably than “cooler” firms like Yahoo, Google, and Apple. At the same time, it is only with the resources available at these sorts of companies that you could put together labs like this and grant employees (Google is particularly famous for this) time to do their own creative work. How much of the work in this lab will be expected to be funneled into Microsoft products versus the general world of academia? Well-known researchers like danah boyd and Duncan Watts have made it work in the past but how different is it to work for a corporation versus an academic institution? I assume there must be some nice perks, including salary…

“Facebook as McMansion”

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Amidst the conversation and consternation regarding Facebook’s recent purchase of Instagram, one commentator makes this comparison: “Facebook as McMansion.”

In the flurry of blog posts, tweets and status updates about the Instagram deal, Facebook was likened to Dr. Evil, Foxconn, the North Korean army, and the Evil Empire — precisely the same nickname given to Microsoft in its monopoly phase.

In his (incredibly fun) take on the acquisition for New York magazine, Paul Ford suggested that Facebook buying Instagram was “like if Coldplay acquired Dirty Projectors, or a Gang of Four reunion was sponsored by Foxconn.” He also called Facebook the “great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear,” and likened it to the “monolith in the movie 2001.” Big and scary.

According to BuzzFeed’s Matt Buchanan, “beloathed” Facebook’s purchase of “beloved” Instagram means “the neighborhood just got demolished by giant bulldozers loaded with money and is being paved over with 800 million McMansions.” Facebook as McMansion — a symbol for complacent corporate culture and stodginess if there ever was one…

We love an underdog, and we’d probably love Facebook more if we thought it were one. While snapping up Instagram allowed Facebook do to away with a competitor, it may be that a rival — or even the illusion of one — is exactly what it now needs.

While the other comparisons aren’t exactly flattering, the comparison to a McMansion is not a good thing for Facebook. Although the term McMansion has multiple meanings, it is clearly a negative label and is tied to these ideas: excessively large, much larger than “average homes,” and a one size fits all approach.

Perhaps these comparisons are getting at a larger issue: is there a point when Facebook plateaus or continuously encounters widespread pushback because it is too big and/or too popular? There will always be a small group of people who dislike the dominant company or product just because it is the biggest and can throw its weight around. At the same time, there could be competitors who arise or circumstances online and with computers that change in such a way that Facebook is left behind. See the case of Microsoft who still has a lot of products and influence certainly its way past its peak.

Sociologist: social media fanned the flames of fire over pink slime

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A sociologist explains how social media helped build a furor over “pink slime”:

Why the outrage around BPI? The Web petition? The TV coverage?

“That’s the wrong way to think about this,” said Matthew Salganik, an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University. “Imagine a forest fire. No one thinks, ‘Which lightning strike did it?’” More telling are the scant rainfall and hot weather that set the stage for a blaze, he said.

The meat industry has been taking heat in books, films, and news stories for years. Add a catchy phrase, schoolchildren, and the prospect that some icky-sounding stuff is in Junior’s Whopper, and you have a PR disaster, he said.

“Social media is something that adds oxygen to the environment,” Salganik said. “It increases the chance that a small spark will turn into a big fire.”

This is an explanation that seems to be gaining steam when talking about how social media contributes to social change: social media can be a catalyst or an accelerant for existing situations and movements. Remember, not all social media movements, campaigns, or memes lead to large-scale change. However, given the right circumstances, social media can help draw a lot of attention to things like warlords in Central Africa or “pink slime” or dictators in the Middle East.

The Internet is not an information superhighway or global village; rather, a “drab cul-de-sac”

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In an interesting article titled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, author Stephen Marche makes his point by comparing the Internet to suburbs:

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

Marche is discussing the disillusion associated with the Internet: a good number of people thought it would provide unprecedented access to information, more global connections, and stronger democracies and civil societies. Instead, Marche argues that it is like the suburbs. They both provide the illusion of a “good life” but with little depth behind the happy facade of McMansions or Facebook. Marche should finish the metaphor: perhaps we need an online way of connecting that is more equivalent to an urban neighborhood, perhaps the kind idealized by Jane Jacobs.

I wonder if Marche would be willing to work with the idea that the Internet may not be the best or all it could be but it is a necessary adaptation for the modern world. This is similar to an argument I’ve made before about suburbs: I think many Americans know that they aren’t all they are said (or sold) to be (see a recent survey where a majority of Americans say they would move right now if they could). However, the suburbs beat the alternatives of small town life (too confining, not enough independence, not enough amenities or jobs) or city living (perceived as being too dangerous and anonymous). Similarly, it would be truly hard to live these days without using the Internet or even not be a member of Facebook as these are becoming (and have become for many) the basic ways of finding out information, buying goods, and yes, “connecting” with others.

Naperville government leads Illinois’ top 20 cities in social media use

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Naperville is used to accolades – see this well trumpeted #2 ranking in Money‘s Best Places to Live in 2006. Here is a new measure of excellence: Naperville is #1 in a suburban government’s use of social media.

A University of Illinois at Chicago study ranks the western suburb No. 1 among local government websites in a study of social media use by Illinois’ 20 largest cities.

Researchers from the university’s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs analyzed the websites using at least 90 criteria to determine how well each provided residents with information and the opportunity to interact with officials. Chicago and Elgin round out the top three…

In addition to its main website, Naperville uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds and about two dozen e-newsletters to communicate with residents. It also is looking into starting a mass notification system that Community Relations Manager Nadja Lalvani likened to a “reverse 311.”

“It’s very important for us to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently with residents and other constituents,” Lalvani said. “Social media is very prevalent and another tool to make sure the message is penetrating our audience.”

The UIC study also found increasing use of social media by cities around the country. In 2011, 87 percent of the 75 largest U.S. cities used Twitter, compared with 25 percent in 2009. Likewise, 87 percent used Facebook, compared with 13 percent two years prior.

It doesn’t surprise me that Naperville would lead the way: they seem to have the resources to make this happen as well as the interest in being efficient, taking advantage of new technology (see the ongoing debate over wireless electricity meters – the city’s view and an opposition group), and communicating with people.

I wonder if the study included talking to residents to see if these efforts are reaching them. This is an on-going issue for many communities: the city/village/town claims that they are putting out information while residents suggest they are blindsided at the last minute or aren’t informed at all. I think both sides are often right: many communities have newsletters and websites where information can be found. However, searching out and reading this information does require some effort on the part of residents. Add in the issue that many communities are without local newspapers and it is more difficult to transmit this information broadly. If this plan of attack in Naperville is successful, I imagine more communities will follow their lead.

A second issue could still limit the effectiveness of the social media outreach. I was reminded of this by a talk I heard last week: governments may make information publicly available but they don’t necessarily make the information easily understandable. For example, a community may release some data or an important report but the language and data requires interpretation that the average citizen may be incapable of doing. There is a translation issue here from technical or government speak to what people can understand and then react to. Or a large dataset may be public but it requires knowledge of statistics and specialized software to make some sense of it. Granted, it can be hard to boil down complex issues into newsletter items but it also shouldn’t be the case that newsletters and tweets only cover basic stuff like brush pick-up and meeting times.

 

Media and product consumption by political views

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This article looks at how political campaigns are using media and production consumption data to make appeals to voters and also includes some interesting charts that map out the differences between those with different political leanings:

Inside microtargeting offices in Washington and across the nation, individual voters are today coming through in HDTV clarity — every single digitally-active American consumer, which is 91 percent of us, according to Pew Internet research. Political strategists buy consumer information from data brokers, mash it up with voter records and online behavior, then run the seemingly-mundane minutiae of modern life — most-visited websites, which soda’s in the fridge — through complicated algorithms and: pow! They know with “amazing” accuracy not only if, but why, someone supports Barack Obama or Romney, says Willie Desmond of Strategic Telemetry, which works for the Obama reelection campaign…

All of these online movements contribute to what Gage calls “data exhaust.” Email, Amazon orders, resume uploads, tweets — especially tweets — cough out fumes that microtargeters or data brokers suck up to mold hyper-specific messaging. We’ve been hurled into an era of “Big Data,” Gage said. In the last eight years the amount of information slopped up by firms like his, which sell information to politicians, has tripled, from 300 distinct bits on each voter in 2004 to more than 900 today. We have the rise of social media and mobile technology to thank for this.

What I like about this analysis is that it starts to get at an understanding of different lifestyle behaviors or groups that underlie both consumer choices as well as political choices. Voting decisions are not made in a vacuum nor are consumer choices: these are guided by larger concerns that sociologists often talk about such as class, education level, race/ethnicity, and two factors that doesn’t get as much attention as perhaps they should, where people live and who they interact with on a regular basis (not necessarily the same things but related to each other). While the microtargeting may help tailor individual appeals, it might also obscure some of these larger concerns.

While the article suggests this data collection is all very creepy, this is made tricky because of one fact: some of this information is offered voluntarily by users.

Both Obama and Romney’s sites allow, if not encourage, visitors to login to their campaign websites with a Facebook account, thereby unveiling a wealth of information: email address, friend list, birthday, gender, and user ID. Obama’s team, in accordance with the president’s call for greater transparency, details his campaign’s privacy policyin an exhaustive 2,600-word treatise. It begins like an online Miranda Rights: “Make sure that you understand how any personal information you provide will be used.” Then things get a little weird.

Among other points, the policy says the campaign can monitor users’ messages and emails between members, share their personal information with any like-minded organization it chooses, and follow up by sending them news it deems they’d find worthwhile. In other words, target anger points. Then there’s something called “passive collection,” which means cookies — lots and lots of cookies. Obama’s campaign, as well as third-party vendors working with, spray trackers so other websites can flash personalized ads based on knowledge of the trip to barackobama.com. And finally, near the end of the policy, comes one more caveat: “Nothing herein restricts the sharing of aggregated or anonymized information, which may be shared with third parties without your consent.”

Romney’s site apparently wants even more from its visitors, asking users who login with Facebook to “post on (their) behalf” and “access (their) data any time” they’re not using the application. You can deny both functions.

Perhaps at the least, users should be made more aware upfront of how their information is going to be used. This could be similar to the new boxes included on credit card statements: the consumer should be able to clearly see what is going to happen rather than have to dig through online user agreements. At the same time, making users aware is different than stopping companies from using information in certain ways. I also wonder how these online companies, like banks and credit card providers, will find other ways to collect data and money if these avenues are closed off. For example, would the average internet user rather give up some of this personal information for the sale of targeted advertisements or pay a small fee to access a website each year?